Dark Souls 2 - Series Strengths and Sequel Changes
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Channel: Joseph Anderson
Views: 351,636
Rating: 4.8586178 out of 5
Keywords: dark souls, dark souls 2, video game analysis, souls series, FROMsoftware
Id: b9jrShSwjPU
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)
Published: Wed Dec 23 2015
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Soul memory was easily one of the dumbest design choices I've ever seen. I don't even know how it was justified other than wanting people to be unable to interact with others and forced to retire a character.
He put out part 2
He also covered DS1 in a lengthy series
Another reason why they might added the teleportation from the start in DS2 was that they wanted Emerald Herald to be an important character. They give her the ability to level you up, so you have to interact with her often. Then they are forced to give you teleportation, because walking back to Majula each time would be too cumbersome. That in turn gave them the leeway to make levels more disconnected.
Given that the Emerald Herald is an important (if not the most important) character in the game, I think it's not too far-stretched.
If that's true I think it's a failure, because the upside of character development of the Emerald Herald doesn't outweigh the downsides of bad level design.
I pretty much agree with everything he says.
I think the only place that Dark Souls 2 is a clear (unarguable) step down is in Boss Design and Story. Otherwise I think it's still a fantastic game, with Scholar of the First Sin making significant improvements in a lot of areas.
I also completely agree with what he says about the DLCs, that they (disregarding the base game) are the best Souls experience so far.
I played Dark Souls 2 at release on PS3 and beat it a couple of times. I then bought it, and all the DLC, on PC and beat it again a couple of times, getting all the achievements in the process. I just got SotFS in Steam's autumn sale and beat it (again) a few days ago.
I am the guy he's talking about, slowly whittling down enemies and abusing ranged weapons/aggro ranges. Hell, in my just finished SotFS playthrough, I loaded up on 500+ poison arrows once I got to Gavlan and used them LIBERALLY to get through the multi enemy encounters (which I perceive to be utter bullshit). I also have never used lifegems, other than the few you pick up while exploring... once those run out I usually have 4-5 flasks and then I just play like I did in DkS1.
So, he's right. I consider myself a fan of the souls games, I've played and platinumed all of them (pure bladestooonnnee!!) and strongly feel that DkS 2 is the worst of the bunch. I kind of want to play it again now without using lockon and with tons of lifegems, see if that changes my opinion.
I actually really enjoyed the story of Dark Souls 2. The idea of exploring this forsaken kingdom and piecing together how the curse affected various areas and characters I thought was really cool. It demonstrated the impact the undead curse had on humanity and a lot of the levels were repercussions of various kings trying to fight it (Lost Bastille, No man's wharf, Undead Purgatory, Huntsman's copse). I do agree that it did not have bosses as iconic as Artorias, Sif, Gwyn, et al... And fighting Nashandra at the end of of original DS2 was definitely disappointing. On the whole though DS2 is fantastic and I recommend it to everyone.
I agree with allmost everything he said. He explains pretty well, why I often feel more fustrated than challenged by Dark Souls 2. I have also not considered to not use lock on besides when fighting some bosses. So far I have nearly completed the main game and completed parts of the DLCs (Iron King completly, Sunken King until Elana), but I am realy lacking motivation to beat the game. So not having played everything and losing my motivation halfway through probably influences my opinion, but I think the DLCs are even worse than the main game. The level design is better, but the difficulty seems so tacked on instead of well build. Most of the time it's achieved by increasing numbers of enemies and their stats. For example lot's of enemies have far more poise than they should judging by optical design.
But besides all he said, there are two things in the game that annoy me more than anything else:
The new hollowing mechanic. If you die, your maximum life goes down by 5% until it's down to 50%. So if something was to difficult to beat at the first try, you have a harder time the next time. For me it made dying far more fustrating. It even seems like the developers realised that going to 50% is to much, so they included a ring that makes you stop losing more health when you reach 75%. But that again forces me to use a ringslot to make a mechanic less meaningfull that in my opinion shouldn't be in the game in the first place.
Soul Memory. Matchmaking is determined by how much souls you collected instead of your level. Souls lost or spend on consumables also count into that. Not being able to regain your souls is even more punishing than just losing them. In the first game lost souls had no permanent effect on your character. You could allways just farm them again. In the second game losing souls means a permament penalty in matchmaking. Constantly running against areas that give you lots of souls (e.g. iron fortress) and losing that souls might even cause you to get out of coop range. So you are unable to summon other players or being summoned by them. Not because you are to strong for them, but because you died to often. I addition to that it causes sidegrading or upgrading a weapon you later stop using to be punishing. As someone who realy enjoys coop in Dark Souls 2, not being able to summon anyone is a deal breaker for me. And I had to restart to game multiple times until I found out that there is a ring, that stops you from collecting souls. But that ring again realy destroyed my playing behavior. As enemys didn't give me souls anymore when exploring, I don't have a reason to fight them. So I don't and just try to run by them to get throw the level faster. So Dark Souls 2 had become running against a brike wall until it breaks in a far more literal sense than befor as lots of stuff seems to be design to counter running past enemies. On top of that that's another ring slot blocked by a mechanic that I dislike.
edit: formating
The biggest letdown with DS2 for me is the enemy placement and how they are always designed to mob you, but no consideration was taken into account what that enemy type is. In DS1, when you were mobbed, it was from low level enemies that could be dispatched easily. In DS2, no matter how hard an enemy is, there's a mob of them. The fat dual cycle guys is an example. In one particular part there's probably at least 5 of them that gang up on you in an area, its ridiculous and frustrating, and leads to exploiting the AI as the video pointed out, as they all clump together as one big mass while you tediously kill one by one. This happens throughout the game, and by god is it annoying.
While I agree with the video in a lot of places, I don't think I could ever call the DLCs the best that DS has to offer. It still suffers from unfair mobbing bullshit that goes against the entire idea of Dark Souls of being fair, and it doesn't help that the enemies aren't interesting either (in both main game and DLC), and seem to almost always be some humanoid, most likely undead (which was also the case for the DLCs, where the main mobs just seemed to be undead but with crystals on them or something in 2/3 DLCs, with one of them being regular undead). The DLCs had some of the best moments of the game though, and it certainly has the hardest boss in the entire franchise so far (and maybe in all of my gaming career) at least for me, that boss being the Fume Knight which took me 8 fucking hours to beat. He was hard because he was a well designed, fair boss though, not because he was bullshit (mostly). Also I also very much enjoyed the dragon fight at end of one of the DLCs, it was probably my favorite boss to fight in the entire game because it was so awesome. It was a little easy for me though, and I'd most definitely say Kamleet from DS1 DLC is significantly harder though (and one of the hardest in the entire franchise; I actually got a friend to beat it for me, who was a DS1 pro who had beaten the game 6 times and even he still had trouble), because the fighting area is so much more open and allows for him to move around more, something the other dragon fight lacked.
Anyway, back to multiple enemies; quite possibly the most terribly designed boss in all of Dark Souls are the throne defender and watcher. They were absolutely terrible and the highlight on what was wrong of the design of DS2. It felt like that they were two individual bosses just put together into a single bossfight, with absolutely zero thought put into how they work together. Compare them to what many consider the hardest boss in DS1, Ornstein and Smough, where they are quite obviously designed around eachother, and is what makes them one of the best fights in the entire franchise. But christ man, what the hell is this? They clump together in one mass, and thus make it impossible to actually attack them without getting hit. I had to use a summon to stop this from fucking happening, because individually they are quite easy, boring and predictable just like 95% of the enemies in the game, but fuck would it have been tedious to do it alone, because you would have had to wait around forever for the right moment to strike, which is when after both of them attack at the same time, which is almost never! Who thought they were a good bossfight? they are an embarrassment to the entirety of Dark Souls.
But anyway. I wouldn't rate DS2 anywhere near as good as DS1 like the video does, nowhere near close. When I beat DS1, I was very much compelled to do a NG+, to see how I and my character have improved by playing earlier sections again. When I beat DS2, I was fucking glad it was all over, and that I wouldn't have to deal with anymore of its bullshit. I am never playing it again. I did get a load of fun out of it, don't get me wrong. But just like how Fallout 4 wasn't a good Fallout game (although nowhere near on the same level; I am exaggerating, DS2 at least doesn't downright remove core parts of the franchise, but rather misunderstands them), Dark Souls 2 is a bad Dark Souls game. It is too copy-paste, doesn't differentiate itself enough, and misunderstands the core of what makes DS great; mainly that the designers thought DS was about being hard, but didn't know that it was also about being fair, and thus thought littering enemies everywhere would be "hard".
I'm really happy to see some positive comments about DS2. I've always felt it received so much unfair criticism just because it is the sequel to a beloved game. I agree almost completely with this video, the best parts of DS1 (-dlc) are better than the best parts of DS2 (-dlc), but the worst parts of DS1 are also worse than the worst parts of DS2.
I think a lot of people went into DS2 expecting DS1.1 or something similar. It's the curse of the sequel: you either make no changes, pleasing people who just want more of the same but disappointing people who felt there were problems in the first one, or you make changes to try to fix problems in the first one but you disappoint the people who just wanted more of the same. DS2 does the latter.
I've always said that I consider DS1 to be a better experience, and DS2 to be a better game. The bosses, areas, and characters in the first game are much more interesting than the ones in the second, for sure.
But the mechanics of the second game make more sense, are more finely tuned and create a more consistent experience. Take the durability mechanic as an example.
In the first game, item durability goes down extremely slowly. To repair a broken weapon, you either go to a blacksmith or you buy the repair kit and repair it at the bonfire. As long as you remember to repair your weapons every third or fourth area you go to, you'll never have to deal with a broken weapon. The first time I repaired a weapon in DS1 was when I got to the blacksmith (obviously) several hours into the game. Even then, I don't think I had taken a single item below half durability. As a result it's just an annoying mechanic that doesn't feel like it serves a purpose. If you do eventually break a weapon, it doesn't feel like it was your own fault, because the game doesn't teach you to remember repairing. It goes against the idea of predictability and preventability.
In the second game, durability goes down way faster. There was a bug on the PC version that made it go down too fast, and that was really stupid, but I'll focus on the console version in this example. Anyways, durability is no longer just a thing you remember when you sit down at a bonfire and see "repair weapons" in your menu. Now it becomes a core aspect of gameplay. You are given a visual indicator of how your weapons are doing in the form of a meter under them. The mechanic is also made more complex. Whenever you rest at a bonfire, durability for every non-broken item in your inventory is maxed out. But if you break an item, you have to travel back to a blacksmith and pay a rather large sum to fix it. This means it's more important to keep your durability in control during the game. If it goes too low, you need to either use a repair powder, or a spell to repair, or find another way of dealing damage (such as a secondary weapon you keep on you at all times, or a magic spell), or in the worst case, go back to a bonfire to fix it, respawning all the enemies. It forces the player to learn new ways of playing the game. Maybe it's worth investing in some Intelligence to cast spells when your weapon is almost broken?
In the grand scheme of things, neither of these mechanics are very important, but I think it's an interesting example of how DS2 made sure all the mechanics really played a part in the gameplay, whereas a lot of DS1's mechanics were insignificant/irrelevant.
Like I said, I still prefer DS1 as an experience, and it's at the very top of my list, but if I went to a deserted island and could only bring one or the other, I would bring DS2, because I feel it improves on almost every mechanic-related aspect and makes a more consistent experience that holds up better today.